Using email marketing tools is definitely one of the best ways for businesses of all sizes to connect with your audience, increase your conversion rate, and improve your overall email marketing service.
With that said, there are tons of email marketing tools out there for you to choose from which can feel quite overwhelming. But I am here to tell you my favorite email marketing platform: ActiveCampaign.
With that said, I am here to tell you about the wide range of features of ActiveCampaign, its pricing plans, and more!
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Benefits of using Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing is a great way to collect email addresses and contact details easily, reach your customers directly, keep them interested, and encourage your leads to buy your products and services.
But if you’re trying to handle email marketing manually like writing emails one by one, keeping track of who opened them, and figuring out what works, it can quickly become tiring. This is where the help of an email service provider comes in handy.
Email marketing tools are software programs that monotonous tasks like sending and creating emails easier and quicker.
Here are more in-depth benefits of email marketing tools:
1. Saves Time and Energy
Email marketing tools take care of repetitive tasks so you can save your time. For example, you can set up an automatic “welcome email” that sends as soon as someone joins your email list, instead of manually sending a welcome message to each person.
These best marketing automation tools also let you schedule emails to go out at specific times. This is just one of those tasks that you really do not need to manually do over and over again when you can ask someone else for help.
2. Connect with your Leads
With email marketing tools, big or small business owners can create emails that feel more personal. You can add each person’s name, send content based on their interests, or even create emails based on what they’ve bought or interacted with before. And no, you do not have to do all of these manually!
For example, if a customer bought a certain product from your store, you can send follow-up emails suggesting other items they might like. This can help turn casual customers into loyal ones and have a better customer and user experience with your brand.
3. Easy Announcement
Email marketing tools make it possible to send emails to hundreds or thousands of people at once. If you have a special promotion, a new product, or an important announcement, you can get the word out quickly to your contact list.
Instead of writing an email to each person individually, you can create one message and send it to your entire list or specific groups. This helps you stay connected with your audience, no matter how big it is.
4. Categorize your Audience
Not everyone on your email list is interested in the same things. Email marketing tools let you group your audience by interests, age, location, or past purchases.
For instance, you can send a special offer to your loyal customers or send new subscribers an introductory email series. By sending emails that match each group’s needs, you make it more likely that they’ll read your messages.
5. Integrations
Most email marketing tools can be connected to other business tools you use, such as your website, online store, or social media accounts.
For example, if someone buys something from your online store, you can automatically add them to your email list and send a thank-you email right away. You can also add pop-ups to your websites to have them subscribe to your mailing list.
This type of integration makes it easier for you to get more leads and customers!
What is ActiveCampaign?
Now, on to the email marketing software I personally use. ActiveCampaign is a well-known tool for marketing email automation that helps businesses reach customers, automate messages and flows, and keep track of sales.
It’s used by over 185,000 ActiveCampaign users and businesses worldwide, making it one of the leading email marketing tools for email campaigns and marketing!
Features of ActiveCampaign
Now, let’s dive into why I and many other creators and online business owners specifically use ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign both has advanced features and basic features that are very helpful for businesses.
Here are some of my favorite ActiveCampaign features:
1. Deliverability Rate
ActiveCampaign probably has one of the highest deliverability rates compared to its top competitors.
This means your emails are more likely to land in the primary inbox of your subscribers rather than the promotions or spam folders, which is very important to avoid for effective email marketing.
If you send emails that few people will even notice in their inbox, then all your efforts in writing a perfect email copy will be wasted.
2. Automation
Another feature that makes ActiveCampaign so powerful is email automation. As you can see here, this is one of my automations and it includes 10 emails that I had to set once, and then all subscribers who signed up for this free online course will receive them automatically.
I set intervals that are usually one or a couple of days between the emails.
But you can also create customized sequences based on how subscribers interact with your content. For example, you can send different follow-up emails based on whether someone opened a previous email, clicked a link, or visited a particular page on your website.
The automation possibilities are virtually endless. This makes ActiveCampaign an excellent choice for you if you heavily rely on email marketing to engage with your customers.
What I also loved about ActiveCampaign’s automation is their new AI-powered automation builder feature where you can save a lot of time by just giving a text prompt here.
For example, I want to send an offer for my flagship program to the students who enrolled in my entry-level course, so I will say I want to send an email a day after the enrollment, then another email 2 days later, and the final reminder 7 days later.
See I just typed it and all the steps automatically appeared here in the automation with new steps and intervals between them.
3. Predictive Sending
ActiveCampaigns also has a feature called Predictive sending. You see, the platform tracks when each contact opens your emails.
When a contact reaches an email action with “Send with predictive sending,” it uses this data to predict the best time to send the email. The email is then scheduled to be sent at the contact’s optimal time within their time zone, within 24 hours.
Their AI feature also offers content recommendations based on what’s working in the industry, giving marketers new ideas for campaigns.
4. Pre-Made Email Templates
When it comes to creating email marketing campaigns, in ActiveCampaign you can choose from pre-made templates or build your own using their drag-and-drop editor.
And I also loved that you have the option to request a free email design service, so you can get a template made by their team specifically with your branding and colors that you picked.
You can also use this new AI-powered feature that generates a brand kit for you. It imports your brand colors, fonts, logos, and social links directly from your website!
The personalization options from ActiveCampaignare great, and you can save different blocks as templates for future use.
5. CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
The CRM in ActiveCampaign is fully integrated with email marketing and automation, allowing you to manage leads and customers without needing a separate tool.
The CRM provides everything from tracking customer information to managing sales pipelines. You can assign points to contacts based on their behavior, such as opening emails or clicking links. This helps you to prioritize high-interest leads.
6. Integrations
Integrations are another strong point for ActiveCampaign. You can click on Apps and see that it connects seamlessly with so many third-party tools and platforms, including Stripe – that’s the one that helps you receive online payments, Calendly, Typeform, Facebook, Google Analytics, and many more.
And even if you don’t see the tool you want to integrate here in the Apps tab, don’t worry because ActiveCampaign is a very popular email provider, so most of the third-party tools have built their own integrations for ActiveCampaign.
If you are a creator like me who also has online courses, getting all the integrations with your online course or webinar platforms working smoothly is crucial.
ActiveCampaign also has specialized integrations with major e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.
7. Analytics and Reports
The analytics and reporting features in ActiveCampaign go beyond basic metrics, giving you in-depth insights to optimize your email marketing efforts. You can go to the Reports tab and see the performance of your forms for example.
You can see what’s the most popular email clients your audience uses. In my case, it’s Gmail.
And my favorite report is about the days of the week and hours of the day when I get the most opens for my campaigns. This helps me schedule newsletters for the time when my audience is more active online.
You can install the tracking code of ActiveCampaign on your website to get even more in-depth analytics and set more advanced automation based on how users interact with your website.
8. SMS and Messaging Channels
With ActiveCampaign, businesses can reach customers across different channels, not just email. SMS and integrations with platforms like Facebook Messenger allow users to connect in a more direct way.
You can send text messages to contacts for time-sensitive offers or reminders. This is perfect if you need to improve your SMS marketing. And if you promote on Facebook, you can use Facebook Messenger to interact with customers, which is helpful for e-commerce and customer support.
With this, you can combine different platforms like email, SMS, and Messenger in a single campaign, keeping everything easy to track.
9. Site and Event Tracking
ActiveCampaign’s site and event tracking allows users to see what pages contacts are visiting and what actions they’re taking on the website. This can trigger specific messages based on on-site behavior.
You can track when a contact visits specific pages, like product pages or pricing pages, to determine interest.
And based on the tracked data, you can build segments like “high-intent customers” or “repeat visitors.”
10. Conditional Content
Conditional content lets you create different email versions within a single campaign to show each contact with the most relevant message.
Through dynamic blocks, you can display different images, offers, or messages in emails based on the contact’s location, purchase history, or interests.
You can also offer location-based promotions or exclusive content based on each user’s profile, helping increase engagement and conversions.
How Easy is ActiveCampaign to Use?
While ActiveCampaign offers a lot of features, it does require a bit of a learning curve. But don’t worry, their team prepared fantastic resources, which include video tutorials and even live webinars covering different features and goals you might want to achieve with your email marketing efforts.
Some of the webinars are actually live Q&A sessions with their team which allows you to ask all your questions that might come up as you are setting your account.
I have used many other email tools in the past but I’ve never seen this kind of thorough training for new users, with webinars and extensive documentation.
You can also get 1:1 support from the ActiveCampaign team either by email or even using their live chat feature.
Support is crucial when choosing an email marketing provider. ActiveCampaign offers very thorough support, but keep in mind that their live chat is not available 24/7 but it is available Mon – Thu, 3am – 11pm, and Fri from 3am – 4:30pm, American Central Time (CT).
Just for context, these are very extended working hours and you know, the fact that they even HAVE a live chat support helps ActiveCampaign stand out because the majority of other email providers I used do not have a live chat and offer support only via email.
Who Should Use ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is best suited for big or small businesses that need to automate and scale their marketing, especially if they’re looking to grow their leads, increase sales, and improve customer retention.
E-commerce stores, growing startups, and service providers can all benefit from its wide range of features. Online stores can use ActiveCampaign to automatically email customers who leave items in their carts, send product recommendations, and run personalized promotions based on shopping behavior.
For service providers like consultants, coaches, or agencies, ActiveCampaign’s CRM and email automation tools can help grow and maintain relationships over time and move leads through smooth active campaign strategies.
Pricing Plans
Pricing for ActiveCampaign works in a similar way to other providers, based on the number of subscribers you have.
The first plan starts at $15 per month and you get 20% OFF if you pay annually. This plan includes essential features like email marketing, subscription forms, and automation. The Plus plan offers additional features like the landing page builder, CRM, and more integrations.
For advanced needs, the Pro and Enterprise plans include features like predictive sending, Attribution & conversion tracking.
After using ActiveCampaign, I think it is one of the best email marketing providers on the market, especially if you have an online business and need more robust automation features.
Even if you don’t need all the features right now, it can save you the hassle of switching providers later as your needs grow.
If you’re still unsure, you can just start with ActiveCampaign‘s 14-day free trial and watch their training videos, and attend live webinars in these two weeks to get all your questions answered.
Why I Prefer ActiveCampaign to Other Tools
ActiveCampaign stands out to me more because it goes beyond regular email marketing— it offers tools that make it easy to automate personalized messages, track customer interactions, and follow up based on what customers do.
Unlike other simpler email marketing platforms, ActiveCampaign includes CRM (Customer Relationship Management) features where you can track sales leads and customer activity in one place.
ActiveCampaign’s automation also lets you set up targeted emails for different customer actions, such as sending a welcome series to new subscribers or a reminder to customers who left items in their cart.
The platform also offers ready-made templates and messages like sending follow-up emails after a purchase. And compared to pricier email marketing platforms, ActiveCampaign offers similar features for less money, making it ideal for small businesses with more advanced needs but limited budgets.
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.
